


there’s a ghost upon the moor tonight

by freefallvertigo



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, F/F, Hallucinations, Suicide Attempt, but like the angst is heavy, kind of
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-02
Updated: 2020-03-02
Packaged: 2021-02-27 19:28:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,888
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22981012
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/freefallvertigo/pseuds/freefallvertigo
Summary: "The truth was, Yaz did die that day. Only nobody knew to grieve her.That was about to change."Post 12x10.
Relationships: Thirteenth Doctor/Yasmin Khan
Comments: 22
Kudos: 226





	there’s a ghost upon the moor tonight

**Author's Note:**

> fuck knows what i’m gonna do w myself for like a year until the next episode hoPEFULLY i’ll just keep writing fics and pretending everything is okay
> 
> anyway have some angst lol apparently i have a thing for writing angsty confrontations on beaches ? 
> 
> title from start of time by gabrielle aplin (a very fitting song for this fic)

Two years.

Two long, black and white years without the Doctor.

It'll get easier. That's what they'd said - what they'd kept saying. Over and over and over again. Yaz knew it was _supposed_ to get easier; that she was meant to grieve and move on and miss the Doctor but slowly let herself find happiness again. That hadn't happened.

Yaz never once stopped grieving. Never stopped missing the Doctor.

She'd tried. Kind of. 

She'd returned to her job for a while. Donned the old uniform and patrolled the beat and settled petty disputes. Never once did it come anywhere near close enough to filling that void inside of herself or offering her any of the fulfilment or pride it once had. None of it meant a thing anymore.

Gradually, she'd stopped turning up for work. They gave her a pass at first. She'd told her bosses she was grieving. But bereavement only grants you a limited window for sympathy and lenience. When that window closed, she tried for sick leave. Not technically a lie. At times, she felt her grief like a fever, leaving her bedridden and sweating and doubled over in physical pain. Given that she couldn't provide any medical proof of this, she was eventually let go. When she'd been given the news, she hadn't even reacted.

It didn't matter. 

It didn't fucking matter.

After that, the only time she ever left her flat was to visit the TARDIS that had gotten them home. When they first returned to Sheffield, she tried the door every day. It had locked its doors to them the second they arrived but for a long time Yaz held on to the hope that one day it might, by some miracle, sense her desperation and open for her. Of course, it didn't.

Yaz hadn't slid back into the throes of her depression. She'd plunged headfirst into it. It had filled her lungs like tar; weighed her down as if there were rocks in all her pockets. It was a visible thing, too. It was in the dark bags under her eyes, it was in the permanent hardness to her face, the sparsity of her hollow words.

What wasn't visible from the outside looking in, what Yaz dared not divulge to a soul, was this other inexplicable symptom of her grief. Yaz had taken to hallucinating the Doctor.

To begin with, it was the kind of stuff you might expect. Believing she'd spotted the Doctor's sweeping coat or blonde bob in a crowd only to frighten some unsuspecting stranger half to death with her intensity. Thinking she'd heard her voice around the corner only to run harder than she ever had and find the street empty. When she began to hear her voice in earnest, though - when she found that she was able to carry on full conversations with this disembodied but unmistakable voice - that's when Yaz knew it went beyond typical. She was losing her mind. And she was happy to.

It wasn't long before the hallucinations took a physical form. Pale; a weak imitation. But Yaz would take what she could get. 

Her family worried. Ryan and Graham worried. She didn't want them to take the Doctor away from her again so she shut them all out. Isolated herself. Became a memory to them. She didn't want their help if their help meant moving on. 

This corporeal manifestation of Yaz's grief allowed her to say all the things she never had to the real Doctor. She apologised that she hadn't stopped the Doctor that day. That she hadn't gone in place of her or of Ko Sharmus. She broke down. It should have been her, she said. It should have been her instead.

But even though she got to say all this to her madness, Yaz never stopped regretting their final moments together. That last, lingering look. Yaz should have confessed everything then. Maybe it would have changed the Doctor's mind. Maybe she'd have stayed. 

She told her ghost countless times. Each time, the words only left her feeling emptier. The truth was, Yaz did die that day. Only nobody knew to grieve her.

That was about to change.

///

Yaz took a long, silent drive in the middle of the night. 

She drove all the way to a distant shore.

A brutal February wind resisted her every step up the hill, but she'd come too far to turn back now. Slowly, stubbornly, Yaz made her way to the top of the cliff where she sat for a while and stared out at the bleak water and pitch dark sky. In a place a lot like this, a long time in the future, the Doctor would walk through the boundary to the ruins of Gallifrey and never walk back out.

She'd been the first to follow her into that great unknown.

She planned to be the first to follow her into this one, too. 

Yaz didn't know if she believed in an afterlife but she no longer believed in this life. Not without the Doctor. Such a cold universe. Cold stars, freezing ocean, numb hands, shaking shoulders. 

Yaz got to her feet.

It was a high tide below. Yaz sought some solace in the fact that the water would carry her heavy bones out to sea; lay her to rest at last. It was dark enough down there that no light would ever find her again and god, if that didn't feel like the most fitting thing in the universe.

"Don't go through with this," came the hollow echo of an achingly familiar voice.

Yaz closed her eyes. "Go away."

"Please, Yaz," the ghost urged. "You've so much to live for. People who need you."

"So many more needed you," argued Yaz. Her eyes cut angrily towards the translucent figure. "That didn't stop you from sacrificing yourself. That didn't stop you from leaving us all behind. From leaving me behind."

"I sacrificed myself for you lot. Don't let that be in vain." Every day, the Doctor's voice sounded further and further from the real thing. Yaz was forgetting. The thought made her sick. 

"It wasn't in vain. You saved humanity, stopped the Master and the Cybermen." Yaz trembled as she talked. She hadn't bothered to bring a coat. It didn't seem necessary. "I'm just one person, Doctor. Less than, if we're being honest. It's my time."

Phantom eyes clung to her. "We can't have a universe with no Yaz."

"Sod the bloody universe. I'd trade it all to see you again." Yaz forced herself to look away from the Doctor. This would be easier if she didn't have to face her. Yaz thought she'd be more afraid up here on the precipice, looking out at the end of everything. Oddly, all she felt was a foreign calm wash over her. Preempting the eternal calm to follow. "I forgive you, Doctor. But I hate you. And I love you. And I'm coming for you."

Yaz looked down. A wave crashed against the cliff face, the temperamental water tearing the moonlight to pieces like an angry deity. It was a deity that craved Yaz, too.

"I'm coming for you," Yaz reiterated softly to the sky.

She took a step forwards.

A firm hand gripped her harshly by the arm and yanked her backwards. Yaz staggered away from the ledge, her heart tripping over itself with a hybrid of fear and relief, and she looked up. Right into a pair of wide, hazel-green eyes searching her wildly. Those eyes. She'd know those eyes anywhere, in any universe, through the blackest of shadows on the darkest of nights. 

Terror coursed through Yaz. "How - how are you doing that?" Her hallucinations had never before been tactile; had never felt so solid or looked so vivd.

"Yaz, what are you doing?" The Doctor's voice came out frantic and broken. Not only that, it sounded so much like the real thing that it hit Yaz like a double decker bus. She didn't even look the same as her usual apparition. No, her eyes appeared older, face so much wearier, clothes dishevelled. "What on _earth_ are you doing?"

Yaz stared back, dumbfounded. "You're in my head." She had to be. Didn't she?

The Doctor released a jagged breath. "Yaz, were you about to-"

Yaz pulled violently away. This was just her mind playing tricks. It was her innate survival instinct kicking in; employing one last desperate attempt to preserve her. She wouldn't have that. "Get out of my head. You're not here!"

Once again, Yaz made for the edge of the cliff. Once again, that hand found hers and gripped it like a vice and she felt the warm skin against her cold palm and she stared and stared because it felt _so_ real when she knew that to be impossible.

"I came back for you, Yaz. I'm right here. I survived. Can't you feel me?" The impossible hand relocated to her cheek. Yaz felt dizzy when her fingertips grazed the side of her head. " _I came back_."

"You're dead," Yaz choked.

"No." The Doctor shook her head. She was crying. "Ko Sharmus took my place. I found a TARDIS and got away."

Yaz's head was in a state of chaos. She struggled to process this; to believe her own eyes. Distraught, she clutched the fabric of the Doctor's coat, held it between her fingers, tested the hallucination for imperfections and inconsistencies. Found none. Touched her neck, her face, her hair. "It's..."

"It's me, Yaz." The Doctor held Yaz by her shoulders, face awash with urgency. "I promise. I'm here."

Finally, the last of Yaz's vehement doubt began to crumble. She looked hard at the Doctor and her heart ripped itself apart under those eyes so full of sorrow and guilt and something else she'd only dreamed of seeing. 

"Two years," Yaz croaked. "It - it's been two years." 

"I'm _so_ sorry, Yaz." And she sounded it. She sounded utterly heartbroken. "It's a long story. I can explain everyth-"

Yaz threw herself at the Doctor. She wrapped her arms tight around her waist and sobbed into her shoulder when a pair of solid arms reciprocated the long craved embrace. The Doctor, too, cried into Yaz's hair and for a moment Yaz wondered if maybe she had somehow thrown herself off that cliff and this was the afterlife she'd dreamed of. She decided she didn't care even if that was true because at long last she got to hold the Doctor in her arms and tell her-

"I love you so much."

And the Doctor, by some miracle, said it back. "I love you, Yaz. I've missed you more than you know."

They clung to one another for a long time, immune in one another's arms to the icy wind and the sea spray, hearts beating too loud in their ears to make out the watching moon sighing a quiet breath of relief. After a time, they pulled away just enough for Yaz to press a chaste, angry, mending kiss to the Doctor's salty lips. The Doctor held tight to Yaz's face like she'd been waiting for this for lifetimes. Maybe she had been.

"Please, Yaz," she breathed. "Come away from the ledge. Come home."

Yaz pressed her forehead against the Doctor's. "As long as you're here, Doctor, I am home."

**Author's Note:**

> find me on tumblr: freefallthirteen


End file.
